[ale] One home directory

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, 2009-10-13 at 20:12 -0400, Brian Pitts wrote:
> On 10/13/2009 02:39 PM, Jeff Lightner wrote:
> > Unison is based on rsync I believe.  Haven't used it but have heard
> good
> > things about it.
> > 
> > By unidirectional I assume you mean rsync only updates one side on a
> > given run.  I'm not really sure that is the case (I'd have to
> explore
> > flags) but even if it were it only means you'd need to run two
> separate
> > rsync jobs - one that used one side as the source and the other as
> the
> > target and another that used the original source as target and
> original
> > target as source.
> 
> That won't work. The first rsync from system one to system two will
> clobber all the files you've changed on system two. From the manpage,
> 'Rsync  finds  files  that  need to be transferred using a “quick
> check”
> algorithm (by default) that looks for files that have changed  in size
> or in last-modified time.' 

Unison is indeed a very good tool; it may have been based on rsync at
some point in time, but I don't think it is any longer.  I used it to
sync copies of data that were modifiable on both hosts, and it did a
fantastic job.  Never ran into a conflict, but that said, I'd presume
that you'd be running the tool in such a way that if one arose, you'd be
able to deal with it.  In my case, I used cron.

Actually, I had someone tell me that they'd wished that GNOME had
something like Windows' "My Briefcase" functionality.  Not a bad idea to
build one around Unison, probably...

	--- Mike

-- 
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